1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a device for detecting/determining a protein or proteins and, more specifically, to a device capable of the detection/determination of a protein or proteins without labeling them.
2. Description of the Related Art
The human genome project, developed in 1990s, was an attempt for some countries to share decoding of all of the human genetic code. It has been announced that a draft was finished in the summer of 2000. It is expected that, as functional genome science and structural genome science progress after this, it will be revealed what function each of the decoded human genome sequence data pertains to.
The human genome project has brought a large change in paradigm to scientific technology and industries involving life sciences. For example, diabetes mellitus has been classified based on symptom of high blood sugar level and, with respect to the cause of onset, has been classified, based on a level of capacity of producing insulin in a patient's body, into type I (insulin cannot be produced in the body) and type II (the amount of insulin cannot be controlled in the body). The human genome project presented all the data of amino-acid sequence of proteins, such as enzymes and receptors, pertaining to the control of the detection of blood glucose and insulin, or synthesis, decomposition and the like of insulin, and a DNA sequence of genes pertaining to the control of the amounts of such proteins exists. Using such data, diabetes mellitus, a phenomenon of the control of blood glucose level being not functioned, can be classified into subtypes, depending on what proteins pertaining to the process of the synthesis, decomposition and the like of insulin are upset, and, accordingly, it must become possible to carry out an appropriate diagnosis and cure. Particularly, development of new drugs based on the genome data, in which drugs are developed for particular proteins based on the human genome sequence, is being energetically promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, and it is expected that the relief and cure of a symptom will be effected by understanding the conditions of a sequence of proteins which are functionally related to each other for the symptom and by administering a genetically developed drug.
To make this possible, a technique enabling simple measurement of the amounts of a sequence of proteins, which are functionally related to each other, is needed. However, such a technique is being developed as a technique of analyzing proteome. As a currently established method, there is known a method in which measurement is carried out by combining two-dimensional electrophoresis and mass spectrometric analysis, which requires a relatively large-scale apparatus. To determine a patient's symptoms at a clinical site, such as a laboratory or at the bedside in a hospital, the development of a simple, novel technique is needed.
A so-called DNA chip is designed to be adapted for the determination of a DNA in a sample to be detected by previously introducing thereinto a fluorescent pigment during the amplification (increment) thereof by a PCR (polymerase chain reaction), and determining the amount of DNA bonded to complementary DNA chains arranged on a chip in the form of array by the intensity of fluorescence. In contrast, proteins cannot be processed by what corresponds to amplification by the PCR reaction, as in the case of DNA. Also, there has been a problem that when plural kinds of proteins are mixed and present in a sample, uniformly introducing a fluorescence label into them cannot be used because the reactivities between the fluorescent pigment and the individual proteins are different.